After years of anticipation, the first trailer for Marvel’s new cosmic superhero movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, finally hit Tuesday night. And as expected, it’s pretty awesome. Two minutes-plus of sci-fi candy for your eyeballs, complete with a humor and tone totally unique to the Marvel universe. Along with the trailer, Marvel released 12 new stills. They give you a chance to get a closer look at several characters including Groot (Vin Diesel), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Nebula (Karen Gillan), The Collector (Benicio Del Toro) and others.

Below, see all the new photos and read writer/director James Gunn‘s commentary on many of the trailer’s surprises.

Here are some new images from Guardians of the Galaxy via Disney. Click on each for Hi-Res:

And over on Total Film, James Gunn broke down the trailer over multiple pages. Here’s just on example of what he had to say.

There is probably no film that influenced me more as a child – no film that excited me more or that I loved more – than Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It not only influences how I see Guardians, it influences how I live my life (which means the way for a woman to win my heart is to paint “love you” on her eyelids. Yes, I’m still single, why do you ask?).

Oh, and because we can, here’s the trailer again:

Guardians of the Galaxy opens in the US on August 1, 2014.

From Marvel, the studio that brought you the global blockbuster franchises of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, comes a new team—the Guardians of the Galaxy. An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits—Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon, Groot, a tree-like humanoid, the deadly and enigmatic Gamora and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Quill discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand—with the galaxy’s fate in the balance.

Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which first appeared in comic books in Marvel Super-Heroes, Issue #18 (Jan. 1969), stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, featuring Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, with John C. Reilly, Glenn Close as Nova Prime Rael and Benicio del Toro as The Collector.

James Gunn is the director of the film with Kevin Feige producing, and Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Jeremy Latcham, Alan Fine and Stan Lee serve as executive producers. The story is by Nicole Perlman and James Gunn, with screenplay by James Gunn.